A girl shook her hands in the air vigorously each time she stepped to the podium as if warming up for an athletic competition.

Jack Ford, 11, sought to project breezy confidence and psych out his opponents even as he tried to ignore the churn in his stomach.

"I was trying to give off the impression I wasn't nervous, to make myself numb, like, 'I'm not nervous. Fear me,' " said Jack, a sixth-grader at Ripon Elementary.

Jack made the comment following his runner-up performance at Wednesday afternoon's fourth- through sixth-grade county spelling bee at the San Joaquin County Office of Education.

He might have won, but he misspelled "lasciviousness" in the ninth round, giving the victory to Annunciation School sixth-grader Jill Rafert of Stockton. Jill, 11, won by correctly spelling "saboteur."

If spelling bees lack the physicality of sporting events, they make up for it with the mental gymnastics they demand of their participants. Sometimes, luck is a factor. One contestant is given a tricky word like "anomaly." The next speller gets a three-letter piece of cake like "rye."

Jill's luck came in Round 4, when she was asked to spell "belligerent." She guessed her way through it.

"I thought there were two G's," she said later. "I still don't know how I spelled it right."

Doesn't matter now.

Jack and Jill climbed the hill over 13 other opponents and will compete in the state bee in April at the county office.

Meanwhile, in the seventh- through ninth-grade competition, Hanna Nakahara of West High and Julie Fukunaga of Tokay High continue to channel in a spelling sense the Chris Evert-Martina Navratilova tennis rivalry from a bygone era.

Last year, Nakahara was the runner-up to Fukunaga when both were in eighth grade. Wednesday, the result was identical. The two 14-year-olds advanced again to the state bee in May in Marin County. Last year, Hanna was seventh in the state, and Julie was second.

"I think she reads the dictionary," Nakahara said of Fukunaga.

Not quite, but Fukunaga did say, "Every time I see a word, I try to remember the meaning and spelling for future reference."